VTrain Flashcard Software: A Review

When I was looking for a good Spanish flashcard program to use on my computer, I came across several recommendations for VTrain… that’s short for Vocabulary Trainer. You can download it and try it for 30 hours, after which the price is under $30; I paid about $24 US but am not sure if that was a brief special or not.  They have the noteworthy comment, “If you honestly can’t afford the list price, contact us for a discount or a free license” and there is a part of the site where they describe what they will do, especially for people in poorer countries.

To  practice at first, you can use some sample card decks that come with the program, but generally you will want to make your own decks, to have exactly the words or phrases you want to learn.

Here’s what the program looked like after I got it going:

Right away I noticed two significant advantages of VTrain over the two free programs I had been testing, Mnemosyne and Anki.

[1] YOU CAN TYPE IN WORDS OR NOT WHEN REVIEWING
Neither Mnemosyne nor Anki allowed for typing in your answer. Sometimes I really want to do this but not always, and I figured my ideal program would give me the option. VTrain actually gives you bunch of options, oshown on the little toolbar below.

Here are your choices when learning the words or phrases you are studying:

You use the blue square if you have typed in your answer and want the program to compare it with the right answer. The green is if you know the answer but don’t feel like typing it, and the red is if you don’t know the answer. The grayed-out square is to show a remark if you have put one on the card, but it is grayed out here because there isn’t one on the card in question. The keyhole is if you want the program to show you the answer, and the recycling symbol is if you want to skip the card for now. There are keyboard shortcuts for these.

So when I am reviewing  vocabulary and I am reasonably sure I know the answer, I hit the keyhole or Control-A  and look at what comes up. If I did know it, I click the green, and the program registers that I know that word.

It doesn’t have the choice that I liked in Mnemosyne and Anki of estimating how well I knew the item. Here, it’s an all-or-nothing matter, and if I got it wrong, it goes back to box #1. However, I find I am using that recycling sign which means “skip the card for now,” if I really almost have it right. Then it stays in the same box.

[2] INSERTING CHARACTERS IS EASY
When you are putting vocabulary into the program, there is a little window you can have open, which has any Spanish characters you might want to insert into the words. For example, here is just the top part of the screen:

On the right, you can see the window with the characters. It didn’t have the ¿ in it when I started using it, but I wanted it because I like to memorize complete sentences and questions.  it’s easy to add characters you want. (This is only part of the list.)

So… I was pleased. This would be better for my particular wishes than Mnemosyne or Anki. The modest price for VTrain didn’t bother me, but if I were on a tighter budget, I’m sure I could have made one of the free programs work fine for me. The algorithms for remembering that those programs use is built in to the software, while VTrain gives you more freedom to set it up as you wish.

How VTrain is Organized

VTrain uses cards, decks, and Cardfiles.  A card is a flash card, with English on one side and Spanish on the other, and it can have images or sound files too.

Cards are organized into decks. As you memorize the words, VTrain will put them into what it calls Cardfiles and I think of as boxes. They use the box analogy too… you can see the row of boxes down the left side here

In this example, I was working with a deck I had created with 11 cards. I made the cardfile have 8 boxes, so I would be reviewing the cards more times than the default 5 times… the help file tells you how to add boxes.

There are no cards in the top box, the one they call the pool, because I have studied all the cards that I’ve entered. The pool is for words you haven’t begun yet. I transferred my 11 cards into the first box and now they are all in the second box because I got them all right today. Confused? It gets easier with practice.

VTrain has a way to put sound files into your card deck, which I didn’t try. Luckily, once you learn the basics of reading and pronouncing Spanish, it’s pretty logical how to pronounce any given word – MUCH more so than English!

If you want to give it a try, you can download  the VTrain trial or you can order it through the same link.